2025-10-06 - 2025-10-10
Ingrid Luijkx and Auke van der Woude
Wageningen University
Increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere lead to climate change. CO2 is emitted by fossil fuel combustion and land use change, but only about half of these emissions remain in the atmosphere, while the other half is taken up by the land biosphere and oceans. To understand and predict climate change, it is therefore important to not only know the emissions, but also understand the natural carbon cycle. Measuring atmospheric CO2 alone does not provide enough information on the sources and sinks of CO2, and therefore other gases in the atmosphere are relevant. One of these is atmospheric oxygen which is directly coupled in exchange processes in the global carbon cycle.
This course will start with an overview of the atmospheric CO2 and O2 cycles. We will discuss the relevant measurement techniques and applications of using O2 as a tracer in the carbon cycle. Following that, we will look at global scale modelling of the carbon budget, with an emphasis on atmospheric inverse models, global circulation models and data assimilation techniques. The course includes practical assignments in which you learn the basics of data assimilation in a Jupyter notebook. This will run on a server through a browser, so you will only need to bring a laptop, and there is no need to pre-install any software.
